A Month at Mozilla

Sep 20, 2010

It’s only been a month since I joined Mozilla as a full time employee, but it feels like it’s been much longer. Joining the Firefox team late in the Firefox 4 development cycle meant diving into a pile of blockers, so I had to get up to speed right away. By the end of my first week, I was the assignee on five blockers, wrote a few patches, and even broke the tree! I couldn’t remember everything I’ve done this past month, so I had to search through bugzilla to jog my memory. It turns out I did a lot! I was able to group most of the larger bugs I worked on into a few categories:

About window: I refreshed the “About Firefox” window to include language about the Mozilla mission, important links, and update functionality. Compare a screenshot of the old about window… …to a screenshot of the new one!(bugs 579547, 571127, 571424, 585475, 591013)

Doorhanger notifications: Continuing work that Frank Yan started, I converted the “Remember Password” and “Change Password” notifications from bar-style notifications to doorhanger notifications. Compare a screenshot of an old notification… …to a screenshot of a new one! (Please note that the styling of these doorhanger notifications is being handled by separate bugs.)(bugs 567814, 573536, 588309, 594572)

Progress lines: I added progress lines to the location bar and tabs, eliminating the need for the progress bar in the status bar. (The styling on these lines is also being handled in follow-up bugs.)(bugs 544818, 578028)

Besides these bugs, I also worked on implementing a quick prototype of a “Share” menu to replace the “Send Link…” menu item with a list of sharing services (bug 588508). There are some tricky decisions to be made about how we’ll generate this list of services, so this feature isn’t going to make it into Firefox 4, but look out for it in future releases!